Bloodthirst in Babylon

by Searls, David

  The scent of burned flesh singed the air.

  “Give it to me,” Dunbar rasped. He held out his hand and Paul gladly yielded the hatchet. Dunbar kicked more of the sleeping bag cloth away from the vampire Leckner and said, “I need more light.”

  Mona removed the shade from the room’s only light source, tipped and aimed the lamp like a flashlight at their victim’s throat. “Remember,” she said, “try to cut through the vocal cords in the first swing.”

  Dunbar straightened. “Where are they?”

  “In his throat, of course. I mean…I assume.”

  “So you don’t know.”

  “I don’t know. Just swing the fucker as hard as you can.”

  “Our expert,” Dunbar muttered. He clutched the small ax in both hands and began to experiment with grips and stances.

  Paul could see the handle darken with sweat where Dunbar’s hands clenched it.

  He turned away to study a stained section of wallpaper. The lamplight from the floor hit that wall in such a way as to cast a vivid and oversized shadowplay version of unfolding events. Paul watched the shadow axeman pitch back on one leg, raise both arms high above his head and hold the position for a dreadful period of stasis that gave Paul time to avert his gaze or close his eyes…but he could do neither.

  When the blade came down, it made a soft, wet sound that ended in a brief, startled inhalation, as though its victim had time to gasp in wonder before the damage was done. Paul kept his eyes fixed on the wall as he heard the harsh breathing of Dunbar, Mona and Jamey—and probably himself.

  Jamey grunted.

  With a quick sideways glance, Paul saw the younger man on sentinel duty by the front window, his shotgun cradled. Though several feet removed from the murder in progress, speckles of blood dotted Jamey’s face and clothing.

  Paul wondered how he looked. He shifted, moved a step away from Dunbar’s mad blade, but continued watching the wall where the shadowplay continued.

  The ax fell again, the motion ending this time with a disconcerting crunch of metal against bone.

  “Ah, Jesus,” Jamey mumbled. It sounded like he’d be sick.

  Paul heard liquid spurting, hitting floor and walls.

  The prone shadow near the baseboard twitched. The hatchet man made a strangled sound in the back of his throat as he raised the blade for a third time and brought it down faster. Finally, the motion ended with the thud of metal biting floorboard and the unmistakable sound of a head rolling across the floor.

  Dunbar’s shadow remained hunched, all but motionless. Paul could hear his labored breathing. A steady, rhythmic drip.

  “How’s it going?” Paul asked hoarsely.

  “How’s it going?” Dunbar’s gaze cut like a dagger. “You get the next one, Country Club,” he snarled.

  “I can’t take this,” said Jamey from his station by the window. He stared at hands splotched with a flying pattern of blood and gore.

  Since he’d stood even closer than Jamey to the revolting act, Paul would be even more spattered by the messy death, but he couldn’t bear to look.

  “Here,” Dunbar said as he bumped Paul’s hip with the blunt edge of the blade.

  He was supposed to take it. It was fair, but Paul kept imagining his wife and toddler son watching him decapitate a sleeping stranger.

  “Here,” Dunbar repeated, sharper this time.

  “I can’t take no more,” Jamey said.

  “We have to,” Mona said thickly. “Paul, take the hatchet. It’s your turn.”

  Paul, it’s your turn. What his mother used to say when it was his week to do dishes. If Mom could see him now.

  “I know a faster way.”

  Later, Paul would try to examine Jamey Weeks’ words. I know a faster way. He’d hear Jamey in his sleep or at odd times and wonder why he hadn’t acted sooner. Why he couldn’t have predicted what was to follow. In those dreams or fantasies to come he’d see Jamey reach for the shade cord where he’d tied it to the radiator, Jamey always moving as slow as the action sequences in a Sam Peckinpah film. Paul always having time to stop him—or, if it was a particularly gruesome nightmare, to stare in frozen horror, knowing exactly what was to come.

  But that wasn’t the way it really happened.

  I know a faster way.

  A blur of movement. Jamey untying the cord, fingers flying.

  Mona shouting, “No!”

  Too late. The shade flying skyward.

  And then, of course, all hell breaking loose.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  What happened next could never be retold with absolute certainty. Whenever Paul tried reviewing it, or when it plundered his sleep, the facts as well as the sequence of events would get snarled up. Or some details taking on greater significance in one nightmare, less in another.

  Sometimes he’d recall the blood spraying the room like a fountain that began under Jamey’s chin, while at other times it seeped.

  But the way it really went down was like this. Something like this…

  The shade shot upward with cartoonish speed and white-hot sunlight poured in, pierced the room like a brilliant death ray. Someone screamed: the body wrapped in a grimy bedsheet. It rolled across the floor, picking up speed like a cockroach in full retreat. The vampire Jason Penney howled. Still wrapped in garbage-bag plastic that seemed to be melting on his hot body, he—it?—scrabbled to his feet and stumbled for cover. He crashed into Dunbar in the suddenly too-small space and jarred loose the hatchet. Sent it skidding across the floor.

  Mona yelped. She sidestepped the frenzied creature and stuck out a foot to upend it as Dunbar stuttered clumsily out of reach. The Sundowner lost his balance and fell into the garage sale couch with a thick arm dangling grotesquely under its cushion.

  The vampire in the bedsheet proved to be another female, a girl with greasy black hair. Shrieking, she pawed the air with an arm that blistered as soon as it came in contact with the sunlight. Her damaged hand wrapped around the base of the lamp and she flung it.

  The lamp struck Mona in the forehead, the bulb shattering with a hollow pop as it knocked the motel owner off her feet.

  The cocooned Jason Penney lay writhing like a worm caught on pavement after the rainclouds had cleared. As the plastic bag melted onto his seething body, the thing rolled over the hatchet on the floor where Dunbar had dropped it. When it rolled away, the hatchet was gone. As if devoured. The creature rose with a cry that contained equal parts frenzied fury and agony. Shielding his face with a sizzling hand, Penney peeked between blistered fingers to take dead aim at Dunbar.

  The Sundowner sat glassy-eyed on the couch he’d stumbled onto, seemingly oblivious to the hand that twitched convulsively from under the cushion between his legs.

  “Todd! Look out!” Paul screamed.

  He snapped out of it as Penney came at him, the bloody hatchet dangling at the end of one ashen arm. Leaping to his feet, Dunbar snatched up the cushion and held it to his chest like the world’s least dependable shield.

  His attention seemed immediately diverted by the wide shoulders, deep chest and thick, flailing arms he’d exposed by removing the cushion.

  “Zeebe,” Dunbar said. Dazed.

  “Look out,” Paul shouted.

  Flinching, Todd resumed his defensive stance, cushion held high, just as Penney brought down the blade.

  It cut through the fabric, spewing gray padding. The vampire’s blade kept going, going all the way through the cushion and into Dunbar’s cheek.

  Paul’s mind played a troubling trick as he watched, in shock, the vampire shave the side of the Sundowner’s face. It seemed as though the inhuman growl, much like the unforgettable sounds he’d heard the night Judd Maxwell disappeared—seemed like it had come from Dunbar’s side of the cushion.

  A thin spray of blood jetted from Dunbar’s face as he shoved cushion and vampire away. The creature Penney tripped over Mona Dexter’s prostrate body and fell squarely in the middle of the bright rectangle of sunlight whe
re he lay screaming and writhing convulsively.

  Smoke poured from his body as though from a broken car radiator.

  Until that moment, only two of the daylighters—Dunbar and Mona—had been directly involved in the claustrophobic battle. Jamey and Paul had remained frozen on the sidelines. But with Penney crumpled to the ground and the girl screaming, still tightly wound in her bedsheet, Jamey Weeks saw a chance to escape his trapped position by the window shade he’d so injudiciously raised.

  With the shotgun clutched to his chest like a good-luck charm, he made a mad dash for open ground. Almost made it, too, but he slipped in the pool of blood and gore near Penney and the beheaded Gary Leckner.

  He went down to one knee, eyes wild, as he studied the thrashing vampire on the floor next to him. In his panic to rise and get the hell out of there, Jamey slipped again, this time falling fully over the spasming creature. Jason Penney instinctively buried his teeth and swollen face into the man’s neck and tore at his flesh like a pit bull taking down a poodle.

  Jamey’s blood had a cooling effect on the creature, hissing as it splashed over his overheated face. Penney hoisted Jamey’s twitching body in a two-handed grip over his head as protection from the deadly rays.

  Paul could no longer watch. He grabbed Mona, still stunned by her collision with the flying lamp, and whisked her to her feet. “Todd, fall back,” he barked. “Get out of there.”

  Dragging Mona, he took two steps to his right and grabbed the shotgun next to Jamey’s slashed body, and five shells that had fallen from the dead man’s pocket.

  Dunbar was holding the side of his face, but blood trickled freely between his fingers. He grunted from deep within his chest as his legs did a rubbery, vaudevillian shuffle. It looked to Paul like the wounded Sundowner might keel over in the next second.

  Paul stuck the shotgun high under his free arm and grabbed Dunbar as he fell. He pulled and dragged the three of them toward the hallway.

  As they passed the couch, a thick-fingered hand shot out from behind a hastily stacked tent of cushions to snag a section of Dunbar’s T-shirt. Paul let go long enough to slam the vampire’s hand with the stock of the sawed-off. It made a satisfying crunch and elicited a howl of pain as Paul yanked the bloodied Sundowner out of reach. Then he reversed the gun and let go with both barrels. A deafening roar, an explosion of couch guts and a scream of pain as acrid smoke filled the room.

  “Fuck you, Zeebe,” Dunbar said with the last of his foundering strength.

  His knees buckled and he choked on the smoke. Paul leaned him against his hip and somehow hugged and tugged and dragged both barely surviving Sundowners down the narrow hall and out the apartment door while still clenching the red-hot shotgun under one arm.

  “Wait here,” he gasped, propping Todd and Mona against the wall at the head of the stairs before ducking back into the horror apartment.

  Vampire snarls had turned to mewling cries that Paul tried to ignore. Holding his breath against the smoke, he grabbed the phone receiver in the kitchen and ripped the cord from the wall. He depressed the inside doorknob button that Jamey had popped open only minutes and a lifetime ago, then closed the door after him, locking it. Buying them a little time, he hoped.

  Gulping for air, he examined the front of his clothing and beheld an even ghastlier sight than he’d imagined. He’d be arrested or shot on sight if anyone saw him on the streets—even in a more normal town—but he’d have to risk it.

  Mona had slumped to one knee by the time he got back to the dark foyer. Dunbar stood at her side, as though at attention and unaware of her presence. Unaware of much of anything. The blood from the six-inch gash on his cheek had begun to coagulate, but Dunbar had a dazed, irretrievable air about him that worried Paul even more than the injury.

  They’d have to hurry. Paul tucked the shotgun under Dunbar’s arm and pushed and led the two down the stairs. He made his face a mask of bored unconcern as he pushed open the exterior door. Both wounded survivors gasped in panic at the sudden daylight.

  Leaving them behind, Paul forced himself to saunter casually to the parking lot. He found the van behind the building where they’d left it, engine running and Kathy Lee behind the wheel. It seemed impossible how normal and unchanged it all seemed when the entire world had been shaken from its moors inside the bloody apartment.

  He made the cranking motion he’d stolen from Ponytail Pete, and Kathy Lee rolled down the window. “What happened? I heard—” Her eyes popped when she got a good look at him. “Oh my God, you’re covered in—”

  “Pull up closer to the door,” he ordered.

  He slid open the van’s door as she backed out of the alley and squeezed as close as possible to the side of the building. Todd and Mona seemed incrementally aware of their surroundings when he went back for them. They walked on their own, albeit shakily. As they climbed into the van, Mona exchanged seats with Kathy Lee. Todd and Paul crouched between the two rows of back seats, as before. They smuggled the still-smoldering shotgun into the floorspace between them.

  “What about Jamey?” Kathy Lee wanted to know.

  “Let’s go.”

  His tone of voice must have answered her question. Paul regretted having to leave Jamey behind, but they simply didn’t have the strength between all of them to carry him out—or anywhere to put him if they did.

  “Head back to the motel first,” he told Mona. He caught a brief glimpse of her forehead welt in the rearview mirror as she tried to shake the cobwebs loose. “We’ll pack up the Dunbar kids and Kathy Lee’s. They’re going with my wife and son. After we get someone to patch up Todd’s cheek we’ll—”

  “I’m okay.”

  Paul had been avoiding the sight of Dunbar’s bloody face, but something made him glance at the man huddled on the floor near him. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing, and the closer he looked the less sure he became.

  Dunbar’s shirt and pants were sticky with blood from a gash that had gone cheekbone deep, and the van was similarly smeared. Mona had tossed the injured man a room towel from the duffel bag Dunbar still carried over his shoulder, and he’d clamped it to his face. Now, as though to prove a point, he held the blood-soaked towel aside.

  All that remained of the injury was a thin red line that looked plenty sore to the touch, but the bleeding had stopped.

  Paul’s lips smacked with a dry sound as they parted. He tore his glance from the scarred face, but his eyes returned, unable to look away.

  “Guess I wasn’t hurt as bad as I thought,” Dunbar mumbled as he dabbed at his cheek.

  “Guess not.”

  There was always a lot of blood with head wounds. That was common knowledge, wasn’t it? Anyway, there’d been so much madness and mayhem in that dark apartment that it wasn’t surprising if his mind had put the worse spin possible on the injury.

  Nonetheless, another voice kept saying, I saw what I saw.

  He turned toward the two women in the front seat, trying to remember what he’d been planning. “The daylighters aren’t used to making decisions for themselves. That’s why I think we can make it to the motel and out again as long as we do it with the sun up. I want all of you to grab your families and stuff your things in a few small bags. Take nothing that won’t fit on the floor of the van, and hurry up about it.”

  He was amazed at how in control he sounded.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Mona said.

  “Sure you are. I want the women and children—”

  “I don’t care what you want,” she snapped. “I’ve lived here all my life and I’m staying.”

  There’d be no room for argument. Paul sighed. “Then we’ll leave you at the Sundown, but we still need your van.”

  “I’m staying, too,” said Kathy Lee. “I can handle a gun as well as any of the boys.”

  “I know you can. That’s why I want you to lead the way out. There are few people I’d trust more with Darby and Tuck. Besides, you’ve got your own kids to think about.”

/>   She made no reply for a long time. Finally she said, “So what do you have in mind?”

  “No time,” he said. “I’ll explain it as we go along.”

  From this moment on, there wasn’t room for a single mistake.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The day had not gone well, to say the least, and now he had a swarm of loud, curious kids to deal with. Todd wedged himself into a tighter ball, burying his face between his arms and the base of the van’s middle bench seat, but the sunlight pricked him like tiny arrows.

  Pricked him like the paper clips being shot at him from the rear seat.

  “Ouch, goddamn it,” he snarled as one tiny bit of metal made contact.

  “Sorry,” said one of the Dwyer kids, but his fit of giggles robbed the urchin of all credibility.

  Todd’s cheek still hurt, but not like before. He’d sneaked a peek at the mirror in the room while Joy and the kids stuffed suitcases, and saw a scar that looked a week old. He’d given his wife an abbreviated version of events, a story that was horrifying even with most of the worst parts edited out.

  “You did that today?” she’d asked, touching the dry welt.

  He’d jerked away as though her touch pained him, but it hadn’t. Not really. “Of course I did it today,” he’d shot back. “When do you think I did it?”

  She’d looked at his face funny after that.

  Even worse than the cut itself had been the way the other Sundowners had looked at him as he sneaked his family out to safety. He’d taken only D.B. aside to explain the situation, but it was like everyone knew he was taking advantage of an opportunity only limited to a few.

  Then there was that little problem of impending vampirehood.

  “Daddy, does it hurt?”

  He felt a burst of irritation as Crissie’s little finger poked his cheek, but he stuffed the anger down inside himself, in the dark place where he stored everything he didn’t want to take out in the light of day. He found his five-year-old’s hand with one of his own and squeezed it.